On the road from Kisumu to the airport, Joyce Mkoya operates a tree nursery. 

When I visit her she is doing a favor to her customer Washington Juan by selling 20 seedlings at a price of 50 Kenian Shillings each only – at least she says so.  She went down from a starting price of 150 Shillings, because he was “crying a lot” during the bargaining, she explains. “I want him to plant.”

With the muscle operated “Moneymaker” pump her six employees drive water up the slope from a water hole – for six hours a day, watering the thousands of seedlings she seeded into plastic bags. That makes it possible to raise the trees during the dry season and sell them when the rainy season starts and customer demand rises.

Joyce bought her first pumps eight years ago. She says: “Before we were carrying water in jerry cans, it was very heavy, very hard. That „Moneymaker“ pump helps us a lot.”

20 seedlings of Casuarina, “The Fluting Pine”, a tree used for growing timber, change ownership. With a helper Joyce squeezes the one meter high tropical trees into the trunk of Washington Juan’s car.